Health-risk behaviors and protective factors among adolescents with mobility impairments and learning and emotional disabilities

Purpose: To identify the risk involvement of three KEY WORDS groups of young people with disabilities relative to a Adolescents comparison group: mobility impairments, learning disabilities abilities, and emotional disabilities. Protective factors are Risk behav explored to identify which individual, family, and school factors are associated with diminished risk. Methods: Analyses are based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of 20,780 seventh through 12(th)-grade youth in the United States. Five negative health outcomes were studied: suicide attempts, sexual abuse, regular cigarette smoker, alcohol use, rind marijuana use. For bivariate analyses Student's t-test and Chi-square were used, and logistic regressions were performed on all dichotomized dependent variables. Results: For most risk behaviors studied, youth with disabilities were more involved than peers. Factors that predisposed to risk varied little between those with and without disabilities. Likewise, there was substantial consistency between groups as to protective factors. What distinguished each group of young people with disabilities from peers is that they reported significantly more exposure to risk factors and significantly fewer protective factors. (C) Society for Adolescent Medicine, 2001.